Commiserate with me...

Oh man! Sorry that happened! The only thing I have to suggest is use "save as" and name your save slightly different to the previous one. Then occasionally copy your "saves" file located in your sims 3 user file and put it in a safe place.

I’m really sorry about that, I hope it doesn’t happen again. If you’re okay with using mods, try NRaas Saver. It reminds you to save every 30 minutes (that’s a default setting, you can change this to be more or less frequent if you want), and every time you save, it saves the data to a different file. By default it cycles through four save files - so, at the first 30 minutes, you’ll be prompted to save your game as file A, and at 1 hour you’ll be prompted to save your game as file B, and so on. At 2 hours 30 minutes it’ll cycle back to file A again - though if you like you can increase or decrease the number of save files it cycles through. Hope this helps :>

I'd take a closer look at Modding the CPS social workers out of the game as those NPC ones removed children from a few of my oldest Modless games and those saves ended up getting corrupted.I lost two when errors occured while saving and the other one when It had a UI failure and refused to open so I deleted it.I always use save as except on a brand new game the fist time I save it and I rename each time I save.I am also playing my game very heavily Modded to remove the issues and fix glitches like the broken automated school assignments or the broken "story progression" commonly known as the EA bugfest.

When I've got a game I want to continue for a long time EVERY time I save I add a number to the end of it. I usually end up with hundreds of saves but I keep them all because I record them and make videos for YouTube and I often need to go back to the save I was on when I recorded the video to see what was actually going on or to rerecord something that didn't go so well in the original recording for whatever reason. Mostly because I actually failed to record it at all.

Since I know I'm most likely going to have hundreds of saves and I want to be able to sort them in order I use the same file name prefix for every save. Such As IP_Household then I add the numeric suffix. The first save might be called IP_Household001.sims3 and the 10th save would be IP_Household010.Sims3 and so on when I get to the 100th save it would be IP_Household100.sims3.

You don't have to keep all of your saves if you don't want to go back to every one of them so you can pick 5 or 10 numbers and cycle through them - or just delete the earlier ones once you're sure you don't want the keep them.

I always only have a few of the saves in my Saves folder. The Rest get moved out to a different backup folder that might be on my PC or on and external hard drive. Wherever it is saved I can always put it back into my active Saves folder whenever I need it.

I've recently come across some old saves I had burned to a DVD. They are from June and July 2009. It was a lot of fun to open them up again and see my old sims in action.

I do as @Karritz does, but I have a different naming for my files. It's something like "SimName AP 2018-11108" where AP is the initials of the city, 2018 the year, 1 - game-year, 1- game-season, 1- game-Day (Sunday), 08 - game-hour. So, "Robert TB 2018-23406" would mean that this save is in Twinbrook, it's the second year, winter, Wednesday at 06 and I played that in 2018.

All in all, the best way to keep track of your saves is using "save as..." instead of "save". You may end up with heaps of saves, but you can choose which ones you'll backup (I don't back up them all). I also use Save Cleaner to make sure that the file will be light, but it can delete your paintings and photos.

Don't give up, everything will be fine!

You guys make me feel careless. I just save as with a numbered file related to whatever challenge/story, and delete most of the backup ones every time I load the game.

I have lots of space so I backup the whole The Sims 3 folder to another drive in my PC and to an external drive. It's the easiest way to do it for me, and then all the CC, downloads, settings and so on, are backed up as well and not just the saves. How often I back up depends on what's happening in my game. I'm NOT going to lose anything! *shakes fist*

That blows!!! It’s happened to me before and it actually hurts so much! My other half doesn’t get how wrapped up you get and invested! He just said “ it’s just a game.” Nope they are our sims!!!

I've managed to recover wrecked saves before, but it's been a few years since I have done it and can't remember all the steps I took. Do you use Save Cleaner? I would run that every so often to clear up the bloat in the files. When all else failed, I would use Nraas Porter and pack everything up into a new save. I also got into the habit of making backups regularly because losing a bit of gameplay is a much better alternative than losing it all.

It might be worth a try to see if you can salvage your save first before restarting or re-doing it.

Just an update, I was able to back to the last save available and it was only about a months worth of time difference. Thanks to cheats I was able to get the game right back to where I was, it just took 45 minutes and LOTS of cheats. My story continues on! Haha